The 2006 UK 3-player
national championship was held in September 2006 at Fan
Boy 3 in Manchester. The results were posted by Clint Oldridge in the Shadowfist-UK
Forum on Yahoogroups on 11 Sep 2006 . (anyone can read the original in the archive).
I asked permission from Clint but he didn't respond; he has given permission
for other posts in the past so I've assumed this is ok too.

Congratulations
to Sam Roads!

Thanks to Happy
and everyone at Fanboy - thanks for putting up with us and putting us up - very
much appreciated. I thought you both did a great tourney, well organised and
efficient. Promos are cool btw!...21 players in total turned up.

The Final: Sam
(Cardiff), Clint (Cardiff), Ian (last year's winner)

Congrats to Sam,
the new 3 player Man.... (Cheese), Clint came 2nd (that's me). Bad luck Ian
and Ed (for meeting me in the 5th round - otherwise likely it would have been
an all Cardiff final). "Immolate to Accumulate" [deck
list], concept by Gaz Hooley, designed by the Cardiff Cartel. (We tested
around 25 other deck designs but none came up to the raw cheapness or versatility
of this deck). 3 of the 4 Cardiff players played some variant of Immolate, Sam
and I got through to the final winning all the games along the way.

Cutest deck I saw
was Hippy Dave's Sam Simian, Mountain Fortress deck. As always it was great
to meet up with fellow SFisters and meet some old favourites and new decks as
well.

>> This "one
trick pony" could be relatively easily defeated with a deck that was expecting
such but was devastating in a field of mainly quick/limited denial decks (even
Alex's deck didn't always manage to hold them to full time). I don't think there
were any SSG cards in the DT decks.

Correct. No SSG
in the Immolate deck none were appropriate enough for this deck (the stealth
gain a power card for ascended was considered but basically the deck runs on
2 power a turn). We designed around 20 decks and tested them out (3 or 4 Jammer,
5 or so Monarch decks (including a recycling Sacred Wigwam/Ice Commandos deck,
a recycling Thunder deck), a couple of Lotus, 1 Dragon deck [I nearly played
that], 3 or 4 Purist decks [get off my land types], one Orange deck, a couple
of Hand decks - Ed played my Sword Saint deck and came 4th, a cop deck or 3,
1 artillery strike deck with the Rise of the NeoBuro amongst others - actually
thinking about it there were more than 20 decks tested in total).

As to it being
a one trick pony - methinks I disagree - it covers most eventualities - bit
like saying a dragon deck puts down a big lad and attacks - this has 10 of them
[admittedly all the same] - the final saw 49 points of fighting vs 30... :-)
There are weaknesses to the deck but we had 2 other main iterations [various
minor iterations] of the deck that dealt with a different environment but they
were felt not needed in the 3 player format. We'd also considered how to deal
with that should it come up but mostly after a short period of time the deck
went 2:1 so that's why we played it. I thought it was a bit of a basic deck
but it's actually a very subtle deck - lots of options for play (one game had
to sit and think for a couple of minutes to get the "best" play, and
playing against Ed there was lots of interesting play options trying to get
events past his Confucians for example).

> > The London
players arriving by 1030 (by three different routes), the Welsh by 1045, then
having to wait until 1145 for the last of the local players.